Madera Tribune, Volume 71, Number 193, 13 February 1963 Negro Social Worker Lays Down His Life For His Hard-Won Friends By LOUIS CASSELS [UPI’s Columist on Religion] United Press International
"Greater love hath no man than this: That he lay down his life for his friends."
Lou Marsh read those words of Jesus when he was a boy attending a Baptist Sunday school. He took them - most Christians do as as a yardstick of ultimate devotion. He had no way of knowing, then, that he would one day be measured against that yardstick.
In hindsight, it seems rather a miracle that Lou Marsh should have had any love at all in him – let alone the supreme kind of love.
He was a quiet, serious-minded Negro boy, more sensitive than most to the humiliations and deprivations. which were visited upon him while he was growing up in one of Philadelphia's black ghettoes.
Somehow he survived all of the hurts without learning to hate. By the time he had won admission to Temple University, he had made up his mind. to devote his life to some kind of Christian service to mankind. He was graduated from Temple and spent two years. at Yale Divinity School, preparing for the ministry. Then, like many young seminarians, he began to have doubts about his vocation. He felt that he had been called to follow Christ, but he was not sure exactly how or where. So he decided to leave school for a while and work.
Assigned To Untouchables
Last May, he got a job as a social worker with New York City's youth board. He was assigned to work with the "Young Untouchables," a gang of Negro and Puerto Recan [sic] teenagers in one of the toughest slums of East Harlem.
What happened after that is recorded in this week's Christian Century magazine by Dean Peerman, an associate editor who was a seminary classmate of Lou Marsh.
"Lou soon developed a strong attachment to the gang members, identifying with them and their troubles ... and he had a large measure of success with his boys. He had won their confidence and respect, he was "getting through" to them."
It was a dangerous job, and when Marsh went home to Philadelphia for a brief Christmas vaction, his mother urged him to give it up and go back to Yale. "I'll be all right," he assured her. "I can take care of myself. Besides, somebody has to do the job."
Last month, word reached Marsh that the "Young Untouchables" were squaring off for a rumble with the "Playboys," a rival gang which had invaded their territory. The crisis developed suddenly on the night of Jan. 7. There was no time to call the police, so Marsh acted on his own to cool off the situation. He walked into a war council of the "Young Untouchables" and persuaded them to abandon the planned fight. Then he started down the dark street toward his room.
Beaten To Death
On the way, he was ambushed by four older boys, "graduates" of, the gang who resented his influence with the boys and his success in preventing the rumble.
Two held his arms while the other two beat him senseless. A passerby found him lying in the street and called an ambulance. But he died in the hospital without ever regaining consciousness. "Lou would not want to be called a martyr," says his friend, Dean Peerman. "But there is no gain saying that Lou died as a Christian doing his duty."
From a human perspective, it seems a terrible waste that a man like Lou Marsh should lay down his life, at the age of 29, on a dirty slum street in East Harlem. But the One from whom he took his cue died on a smelly Palestine hillside at the age of 33, and there have been few who have thought during the past 20 centuries that either his life or his death were a waste.